Blackout over for WKRG

Those who held out on buying a TV antenna before football season started have at least partially won their gamble.

With college football beginning in earnest last week and the pro season kicking off this week, Nexstar and AT&T beat the clock and reached an agreement that put two local stations back on the provider, according to WKRG-TV General Manager Jesse Greer.

Nexstar and AT&T released a joint statement last Thursday announcing the end of the blackouts that affected millions of users and also reportedly cost AT&T millions of subscribers as well.

“Nexstar Media Group and AT&T have entered into a new multi-year retransmission consent agreement to provide Nexstar-owned network affiliated and local broadcast stations to customers of AT&T’s video platforms in 97 markets across the United States,” a joint statement released by the companies stated.

AT&T/DirecTV has “blacked out” Nexstar stations nationwide since the beginning of July, meaning viewers who get their television through either AT&T or DirecTV have not been able to see local stations owned by Nexstar. The lengthy contract battle left many viewers upset and led to customers nationwide dumping AT&T as a service provider.

The unhappiness was about to become even more acute with the start of football season. WKRG is a CBS affiliate and the network is one that carries a good bit of college football. The NFL’s regular season begins this upcoming weekend, and CBS is one of the two networks carrying a lion’s share of those games.

Still no word as to whether the same contract negotiations that have kept WPMI-TV and WJTC-TV blacked out since the beginning of June would be coming to an end soon. WPMI is an NBC affiliate, and while the network does not carry a lot of college games, it will carry the NFL’s kickoff game next Thursday night, Sept. 5, between Green Bay and Chicago. The network hosts “Sunday Night Football” as well. So those games will remain unavailable to AT&T customers until a deal is worked out.

About The Author

Rob Holbert is co-publisher and managing editor of Lagniappe, Mobile’s independent newspaper. Rob helped found the newspaper after a career that started as a police reporter and columnist at the Mississippi Press in Pascagoula. He followed that with a stint as a deputy press secretary for then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in Washington, D.C.
After leaving Capitol Hill, Rob worked ghost-writing opinion articles for publication in some of the nation’s largest newspapers. From 1999 through Aug. 2010 he was the faculty adviser for the University of South Alabama student newspaper, The Vanguard, and in 2002 started Lagniappe with his business partner Ashley Trice. The paper now prints 30,000 copies every week and is distributed at more than 1,300 locations around Mobile and Baldwin Counties.
According to Scarborough Research, Lagniappe now has more than 80,000 readers each week, with close to a quarter of that coming online. The paper began publishing weekly at the beginning of April 2014.